Thoughts on Popular Culture and Unpopular Culture by Jaime J. Weinman (email me)

Monday, July 03, 2006

OT: Media, er, Issues

Some of you may have noticed that one of my current obsessions is the news media, and specifically how the news media is continually wedded to storylines that don't have any basis in observable reality, but track very neatly with conservative talking points. (Starting with the run-up to the Iraq war, fear of being "liberal" caused the media to become, essentially, a regurgitator of conservative storylines.) Fortunately there's a new blog that deals with this subject on a regular basis: "The Horse's Mouth" by Greg Sargent. This is basically a clearing-house for media issues like the recent attacks on the New York Times (attacks which were so vicious that they led a Wall Street Journal reporter to condemn his own paper's editorial page on national television), the fact that paranoid genocidal lunatics like John Hinderaker and Michelle Malkin are invited on network television and treated with respect, and the practice of granting anonymity to sources who merely repeat government talking points. Some of it covers the same ground as Eric Boehlert's recent book "Lapdogs". but it's a useful blog, particularly at a time when networks and newspapers seem more responsive to bogus charges of liberal bias than to actual substantive media criticism.